Next Shows at The Arts Café Mystic - The LaGrua Center

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October 23: Margaret Gibson

MARGARET GIBSON, Connecticut’s State Poet Laureate (2019-2022), has published

14 books of poems with LSU Press, most recently Draw Me Without Boundaries. New

books will be forthcoming in Spring, 2027: Old Love and Present Tense, two books

bound in one volume. Awards include The Lamont Selection, Melville Kane Award,

Connecticut Book Award (twice), Finalist for the National Book Award, Finalist for the

Poets’ Prize. With a grant from the Academy of American Poets, Gibson edited the

anthology, Waking Up to the Earth: Connecticut Poets in a Time of Global Climate

Crisis.

https://margaretgibsonpoetry.com/

November 20: Sophie Cabot Black

Sophie Cabot Black’s poems have appeared in The Atlantic, Bomb, The New Yorker, Granta, The Nation, The New Republic, The Paris Review, Poetry, and Tin House, among other journals. Her work has also appeared in various anthologies, among them Best American Poetry, Fatherhood, Doggerel, and Poems About Horses, anthologies from the Everyman’s Library Series.

Her three books from Graywolf Press are The Misunderstanding of Nature, which received the Norma Farber Book Award from the Poetry Society of America,  The Descent, which earned the Connecticut Book Award and was nominated for the 2005 Colorado Book Award, and The Exchange, of which Publisher’s Weekly said: “Black weaves sheer elegance and devastating knowing” (starred review).

And of her newest collection, Geometry of the Restless Herd (Copper Canyon), Publisher’s Weekly said: “”Cabot Black’s stunning, fable-like fourth collection urges readers, ‘do not expect the known; you were not there.’ This unusual and poignant volume is equal parts gothic and pastoral, full of incisively written imagery characterized by sparse stanzas that allow each line to shine. . . . The poems in this collection run no risk of being mistaken for another poet’s oeuvre. Singular and striking in their movements and tone, they are a testament to delicate beauty. Cabot Black walks the tightrope between the gnomic and the visceral, and sticks the landing with the utmost skill and tenderness.”—(starred review)

She has been awarded several fellowships, including at the MacDowell Colony, the Fine Arts Center in Provincetown, and the Radcliffe Institute, and appears at national literary festivals such as the Los Angeles Times Book Festival and the Dodge Poetry Festival.

Black has taught at the New School, Rutgers, and Columbia University, and continues to teach at the 92nd St Y and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. She holds degrees from Marlboro College and Columbia University.

Of her work NPR has called her “a poet’s poet”, Billy Collins has said,  “she has concocted a way of speaking in poetry that’s very fresh and daring”, and from the Library Journal: “lovely work for many readers; surely even those who don’t typically read poetry will find understanding here”.

She has also published several essays, translated poems, and more recently finished two song cycles and a libretto.

She was born in New York City, the daughter of a Broadway producer and an opera producer, raised on a small farm in New England, and currently divides her time between New England, New York, and Colorado.

https://sophiecabotblack.com/about-the-poet/

Featured Musician: TBA

Karl Dennis, guitars/vocals

Laura Gulley, violin

Theodore Mook, cello 

From Warren RI, Karl Dennis is a prominent fiddler in New England's folk and bluegrass scene. He was a founding member of the Neon Valley Boys (inducted into the RI Blue Grass Alliance Hall of Fame in 2023) and the Pegheads, and has appeared with the Lost Melody Ramblers and Cheap Music. Best known for his fiddle playing in the folk/bluegrass world, he is also an expert guitarist, vocalist and mandolin player, with a passion for writing songs of particular poignancy. Karl is also one of the world's master luthiers, having made many of the exquisite viols, vielles, violins, violas, cellos and guitars now occupying the hands of leading musicians around the world. (Including the guitar, violin and cello on this evening's program.) His profound historical insight and soul sensitive handling make him a care-taker for many precious string instruments and their pets, the human musicians that carry them around. 

Since earning a B.S. in music and mathematics from Brown University, violinist Laura Gulley has become one of New England's most distinguished (and busy) musicians. She is a member of the RI Philharmonic; has performed historical violin/viola with Boston Baroque, the Boston Early Music Festival Orchestra, the Arcadia Players, Foundling, L'Académie, Bostonades, La Donna Musicale, and the Rowe's Lane Quartet; and has travelled throughout the US, France, Italy, and Taiwan with the Renaissance group Renaissonics. She has recorded with La Donna Musicale, three Telarc recordings with Boston Baroque, and two with Renaissonics. Laura collaborates with living composers (the RI composers Alec K. Redfearn and Steven Jobe, for example); an eclectic mix of bands & chamber groups (Braveyoung, The Body, the Amoebic Ensemble at Festival MIMI in Arles, Theophilus Root at the Beyond: Microtonal Music Festival in Pittsburgh); and directed the premier performance of Steven Jobe's five-act opera "The Legend of the Fairy Melusine" at First Works Providence. Being a lifelong student of Suzuki music education she also teaches Suzuki violin and viola at the Music School of the Rhode Island Philharmonic. 

After almost 30 years as a professional musician in New York City, where he performed on Broadway, with orchestras, chamber groups and contemporary music ensembles, cellist Theodore Mook relocated to rural Rhode Island. Currently, he and his architect wife curate a concert series, SwitchArts, in the small 19th century parish church they share, featuring an international roster of artists and poets of all styles. Being an active proponent of new music, Mr. Mook continues to commission and premiere works by living composers in the US and beyond. He has performed at the Library of Congress, the American Academy in Rome, the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, The Kennedy Center, The Brooklyn Academy of Music, The Kitchen, The Knitting Factory, and the Ijsbreker in Amsterdam; and with dozens of pop/jazz/rock artists (J.Z., Sting, James Taylor, Chris Martin).  He also performs Renaissance, Baroque and early Classical music with a copy of the Christiani Stradivarius historical cello (built by Karl Dennis) and a small 7-string bass viola da gamba modeled after an instrument by Michel Colichon from the late 17th century. His extensive discography spans over 100 classical and contemporary works, on ECM, Sony, and New World Records.

Denise Abercrombie

Denise Abercrombie’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in Beloit Poetry Journal, Blue Collar Review, Connecticut Review, CT Woodlands, Earth’s Daughters, English Journal, Fireweed: A Feminist Quarterly, Here: a poetry journal, Minnesota Review, Phoebe: Journal of Feminist Aesthetics and Scholarship, Waking Up to the Earth: Connecticut Poets in a Time of Global Climate Crisis,Writing on the Edge, Yale Global Health Review, and elsewhere. Denise helps coordinate Curbstone Foundation’s Poetry in the Julia de Burgos Park series in Willimantic. She teaches creative writing at Eastern Connecticut State University and lives in Storrs, Connecticut.